Indigenous Women, Work, and History

1940–1980

Mary Jane Logan McCallum (Author)

When dealing with Indigenous women’s history we are conditioned to think about women as private-sphere figures, circumscribed by the home, the reserve, and the community. Moreover, in many ways Indigenous men and women have been cast in static, pre-modern, and one-dimensional identities, and their twentieth century experiences reduced to a singular story of decline and loss. In Indigenous Women, Work, and History, historian Mary Jane Logan McCallum rejects both of these long-standing conventions by presenting case studies of Indigenous domestic servants, hairdressers, community health representatives, and nurses working in “modern Native ways” between 1940 and 1980.

Based on a range of sources including the records of the Departments of Indian Affairs and National Health and Welfare, interviews, and print and audio-visual media, McCallum shows how state-run education and placement programs were part of Canada’s larger vision of assimilation and extinguishment of treaty obligations. Conversely, she also shows how Indigenous women link these same programs to their social and cultural responsibilities of community building and state resistance. By placing the history of these modern workers within a broader historical context of Aboriginal education and health, federal labour programs, post-war Aboriginal economic and political developments, and Aboriginal professional organizations, McCallum challenges us to think about Indigenous women’s history in entirely new ways.

Awards

WINNER, Manitoba Day Awards, Association of Manitoba Archives (2016)

NOMINEE, Canadian Aboriginal History Prize, Canadian Historical Association (2015)

Reviews

“Scholars of all stripes should enthusiastically embrace Mary Jane Logan McCallum’s new study on Indigenous work.”

– Douglas K. Miller, Southern Methodist University, Labour/Le Travail

“This is an important monograph. Carefully researched and thoughtfully written, it contributes in meaningful ways to our understanding of the history of wage-earning women in mid-twentieth-century Canada.”

“An important study of history, work, gender, and Indigeneity. By highlighting the understudied issue of Indigenous women’s experience of waged work in the latter half of the twentieth century, and by questioning and critiquing English-Canadian history and its attitude towards Indigenous history and historians, McCallum expands several fields of research and challenges scholars to rethink key aspects of their scholarship and profession.”

“Mary Jane Logan McCallum unveils part of the rich yet largely unacknowledged history of female Indigenous labor in Canada, taking into consideration both racial and gender oppression. McCallum’s study is designed as an antidote to the rhetoric of decline, loss, and absence in Indigenous historiography. She is careful to include the perspectives of female Indigenous workers drawing from a variety of sources, including interviews, literature, and oral histories. She also draws attention to the gaps in sources and the fact that this invisibility can signify resistance.”

– Patrizia Zanella, Studies in American Indian Literatures

”This book challenges persistent narratives about Aboriginal women in Canadian history, in part by recovering the history of Aboriginal women’s waged work and locating that history within the context of state policies and social discourses of modernity, Aboriginality, race, and gender. In so doing, McCallum challenges the existing scholarship on Aboriginal people’s history and rejects long-standing conventions that have erased Aboriginal people’s labour and ignored women as economic actors and workers.”

– Julie Guard, University of Manitoba

“Indigenous women’s history is still under-researched so this significant and accomplished book is a rewarding read.”

“McCallum’s work begins to fill a tremendous gap in our understanding of Indigenous women, labor, and Canadian history.”

– Colleen O’Neill, Utah State University, Pacific Historical Review

“A pioneering piece of gender-based scholarship that addresses a gaping hole in the country’s already underdeveloped knowledge of First Nations’ experience and their communities’ all to often uncomfortable fit into the larger Canadian narrative. This is a marvellous book, animatedly told, freighted with invaluable insights.”

“Mary Jane Logan McCallum’s timely and important Indigenous Women, Work, and History uses diligent scholarship to locate Indigenous Canadian women as a living component of their historical period. McCallum moves the conversation away from common narratives of displacement and looks at these women’s lives through the lens of their labour.”

“Boldly contributing to conversations on advancing the field and practice of history, Indigenous Women, Work, and History is an intriguing read for scholars in Canadian and First Nations studies.”

– Katie Keliiaa, University of California, Berkeley, American Indian Culture and Research Journal

“Bridges the fields of labour history and Indigenous women’s history.”

– Gender & History

“Deftly written by Mary Jane Logan McCallum, Indigenous Women, Work, and History is a seminal work of original scholarship providing a definitive four decade history of Canada’s indigenous female population as part of the Canadian labour force.”

– Midwest Book Review

About the Author

Mary Jane Logan McCallum, of the Munsee Delaware Nation, is an professor in the Department of History, University of Winnipeg and is the author of Indigenous Women, Work, and History, 1940–1980.